In the late autumn, throughout the Turkish Empire, the elections took place. Turks, Albanians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Wallachs, Armenians, Jews, Latins, Arabs, Syrians, Kurds, Druses, elected their Deputies to a Chamber which represents so many races, interests, creeds, and languages that Turkey’s new Parliament in all probability would have been a Babel of vain talk and no doing had it not been that the cause of the Committee of Union and Progress triumphed in European Turkey and in Anatolia, and secured many adherents in other parts of the Empire, with the result that the nominees of the Committee formed a large majority in the Chamber. I was in Constantinople during the election operations, and very interesting and picturesque they were. On the night preceding the polling the big drums were beating loudly in the Turkish quarters of the capital to remind the electors that it was their duty as good citizens of a free country to go on the morrow to the appointed places and drop their voting papers in the ballot boxes. On the following morning the great city presented a very animated appearance. Large processions were formed to carry with due ceremony the urns, or ballot boxes, to the various mosques, Greek and Armenian churches, synagogues, police stations, and other public buildings, in which the voting was to take place. A typical Mussulman procession which passed me was composed as follows: First came a military band and a small escort of infantry; next a carriage draped with Turkish flags, containing the voting urn and a few officials; lastly, a motley Mussulman crowd of voters and others, including _imams_, accompanied by theological students, pupils of the artillery and naval academies and numbers of happy school children, conspicuous among which was a band of tiny Moslem girls, wearing veils and waving miniature Turkish flags as they toddled along by the side of some tall _gendarmes_ who brought up the rear of the procession. This and the other processions which I met moved through the crowded streets to the accompaniment of martial music, the singing of patriotic songs, occasional cheers for liberty and justice, and the waving of many flags. These were, indeed, the most good-humoured and happiest election demonstrations one remembers to have seen in any country; there were no party cries or manifestations of party feelings of any sort; all seemed to be thinking of the good of their country alone, and to be rejoicing in its liberation. The Greeks and Armenians had similar processions, also headed by military bands (for these had been lent to all sections of the electorate by the authorities), and here, too, the priestly element was largely represented. At one manifestation which I saw in Stamboul the Turk and Armenian electors joined forces, and there were to be seen in the combined procession Mussulman _hodjas_ and Armenian priests in their full Mohammedan and Christian canonicals, walking hand in hand in amity. For a while